A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, December 31, 2010

The BBC, being legally required to show "due balance" say (well OK said in 2002 but they haven't retracted it): Snow could become a thing of the past in Scotland as climate change drives up temperatures and causes the sea level to rise, according to weather experts.

Scientists have suggested that the sea level around Scotland could rise by up to 60cm over the next 80 years while temperatures could increase by between 2.5 and 3.5C...

He said Scotland had to cut greenhouse gas emissions and claimed the Scottish Executive had started to do so through its Scottish climate change programme.

He said: "But government cannot do it alone, we need to start changing public behaviour....

"Some people say they see the climate changing already. But certainly within the next 10-20 years we are really going to start noticing it."

Dear BBC,
I note that the BBC have officially claimed that by 2012 we are "certainly" going to start noticing the effect of catastrophic warming in our lives. While the government has said that they wish to propagandise to change the public's opinions it would obviously be a breach of the BBC's legal requirement of "due balance" without which it would plainly be fraudulent to demand the licence fee, for the BBC to involve itself in propaganda.

The BBC has publicly acknowledged that with 10s of thousands of hours of programming pushing warming alarmism you have not produced one giving free range to the opposite view.That being the case there are only 2 possibilities - that the BBC is wholly, completely & totally dishonest & corrupt or that the disappearance of snow has been so complete that it has been widely noticed. The BBC coverage of climate represents, we are told, the very highest standard of honesty to which the BBC ever aspires. Certainly a higher standard of honesty than the undisputed fact that everybody at the BBC lies & censors to promote racism, genocide, child rape & cannibalism is the Nazi interest.

I would therefore be interested to know what evidence you can produce to support your claim that we are currently experiencing noticeable amou8nts of catastrophic warming. Obviously that must be the case if anybody at the BBC can ever, under any circumstances, claim not to be personally wholly corrupt in non-racial matters.
--------------------------------
The government has equally been proven wholly dishonest According to the Independent in 2000 (a page which has recently been the most popular on their archive but for which they yet to issue any retraction or apology):

According to Dr David Viner a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

2 - Build a central, tidal, lane on the Forth Bridge for £10 million max.

3 - Find out why the current Forth Bridge proposal is costed at £2.3 bn while the previous one cost £19.5 million (£320 m in current money) & the rest of the world's are similarly low.

4 - Introduce a bill to remove any of this extra costing that is bureaucracy rather than purely theft for any project declared to be "of importance for national transport needs." Note that UK public projects routinely cost 13 times what they do elsewhere. Difficult to underestimate how much that costs the long term economy.

5 - Hire the people who have been digging the tunnels in Norway at about £5m per km. & let them produce

23 - Raise a land value capture tax, ringfenced for transport, by charging £10,000 for each new building built in places that were relatively inaccessible before the tunnel project. Thus would be a small part if the increase in land values for housing a hours drive from Glasgow which had previously been almost valueless because ut was day's drive, or sail, away.

24 - Fully automate Glasgow subway.

25 - Fully automate Glasgow - Edinburgh train.

26 - Bring all M8 up to proper motorway standard.

27 - Encourage both Glasgow airports, now within 40 minutes train time of each other to work as a hub e.g. people can check in at each other's sites.

28 - Put up prize for a Road from the Isles hovercraft race - Skye to Dundee. Encourages tourism & the development of commercial hovercraft suitable to Scottish H&I conditions.

29 - Negotiate a Scottish Grand Prix

30 - Get on with Hunterston Deep Water Port Facilities.

31- Ditto Skapa Flo transhipment port.

32 - Build HVDC cables to Russia (possibly via Scandinavia though the whole Baltic is international water), Iceland & Canada where electricity can be bought at 1/4 the price here. (I'm not sure if transporting electricity counts as transport but if you do it it does).

33 - Build a HVDC cable to Germany so we can sell all our cheap renewable power to them. If it doesn't turn out to be cheap (?) sell Canadian/Russian/Icelandic stuff at a good mark up.

- These 2 together would be the start of an international grid - free trade in electricity being as beneficial to the world as free trade in anything else.

36 - Put up a £400 million prize if the first reusable space plane is built in Scotland.

34 & 36 cost zero if nobody wins it. Note that this prize system has been repeatedly lauded by Alex Salmond in describing the Saltire Prize.

37 - Negotiate with the UK for Ascension Island to be put under Scottish control.

38 - Make Ascension Island a tax free island, improve its infrastructure, make clear the prizes apply to it & encourage it to become the world's premier spaceport.

39 - Build a permanent world space College for Promoting Economically Progressive Space Law in Stirling or Edinburgh. Would naturally get us in on the ground floor of a fast growing industry.

40 -.Lay down plans for Tarbet/St Helena to be the bases of the world's first paired space elevator.

41 - Gradually fully automate all Scottish rail transport with modern rolling stock based on (& weighing no more than) buses.

42 - Introduce a law to allow quick & easy building of & provide set per km subsidies for automated overhead monorails.

43 - Work with providers of automated travel to encourage through ticketing so that it is possible to but a ticket on the monorail, on the way to the station for intercity train travel & then the monorail to within a few hundred yards of your destination.

44 - Encourage an automatic parcel delivery system for large new buildings.

45 - Increase the subsidy of H & I airports to 100% of running costs, remove those security rules applying to all airports which are clearly nonsense for ones with a couple of flights a day. This would give low cost airlines a reason to use them, greatly increase traffic & bring costs way down.

46 - Provide tax rebates for anybody building or expanding port facilities, even or indeed particularly small ones, particularly on the Scottish Islands.

47 - Ensure there is a mobile phone network across the islands & ocean & require pleasure boats to have GPS. This would massively encourage pleasure boating there.

48 - Build a road/dyke across the outer edge of the Solway Firth & claim the reclaimed land, mostly, for Scotland.

49 - Make a generous offer to sublet our tunnel crew to the Isle of White for merely a reasonable mark up.

I must admit to having some doubts that any of this will be done or even considered on its merits since all transport ministers, back to Nicol Stephen, have refused to do so. He said his department would only consider a monorail at Glasgow Airport if I could produce someone willing to build it & when I did, he, or his apparatchik on his orders, "clarified" that promise saying he would actually only ever in any circumstances consider any new idea if presented by the leaders of the Labour or LibDim parties.

On the other hand there is no doubt that efficient transport is a major pillar of economic success & that Scotland, not merely because we are at the far end of Britain, has very poor transport infrastructure. That & our disgracefully expensive power supplies (32, 33) are major factors in the unnecessary impoverishment of the Scots people. These improvements would certainly allow the economy to grow at Chinese levels if that were desired. On a party point I think #1, done after the collapse of Labour's GARL project would lend the SNP considerable crediblity. I am even niave enough to suspect that appearing sensible competent & innovative would be more popular than the alternative, even in Scotlamd.